7/3 Expressions

Happy Independence Day (a bit early)! The picture to the side shows what I got in the mail today. I vaguely remember buying a fairly inexpensive item at CVS and mailing in the receipt to Glamour for a "Bag filled with samples", while supplies last, - or so I thought! Much to my surprise and delight, I got the chic bag with full sized products - the card inclosed was from CVS and Glamour. Very nice.

I also got a $10 Rite Aid gift certificate in the mail. I had to chase them around for this.

We also just signed the paperwork to change our HEL from Citi-mortgage - my opinion, a company with the worst customer service and always trying to rip-off the customer off. Uh, yes - perhaps you made some bad loans - but don't try to get well on the rest of us. My beef - as you know, I am trying to pay-off our beach condo as soon as possible - our last debt. Wouldn't you know it, every additional principle payment I made - they tried to process as an advance payment (warning - interest rip-off!!) - and every month - I would call customer service to ask them to convert it back to a principle payment. I got transferred all over the place, got agents that didn't know what I was talking about, placed on hold for what seemed to be forever - horrible! Wrote two letters with no satisfaction. Yes, I have reported them to the State Attorney General and the Mortgage Institution oversight agency - hope they do something. I did see the "CIT" was or is planning to sell-off it's mortgage lending arm - so, I wonder if this is why they are cranky and looking for ways to earn/rip-off? a few extra bucks? So, if you have a HEL with Citi-mortgage and are making additional principle payments - make sure they post them as principal payments!

At the last minute, we decided to BBQ tomorrow. So, after leaving our local bank - we headed to Kroger and bought a gift card and earned 10% additional spending amount on the gift card. I was going to buy it a couple of weeks ago - but didn't since the offer doesn't end until the end of this month - or close to it. We used our hotel points credit card to stretch it a bit further.

And finally, even though the stock market was up a bit today - last week was horrible! But, I have not checked any holdings - because I keep telling myself - we are dollar cost averaging, we don't need the $ immediately, yada yada.